Important (?)

Trying to correct disinformation is futile, because corrections don't change minds, they simply increase the salience of the original lies. This "boomerang effect", according to current received wisdom, is why people who know what they're talking about are unable to stop lies and the lying liars who tell them.

Interestingly depressing, if true. But how robust is the evidence for the boomerang effect? Not very, according to Daniel Engber. If so, the boomerang effect theory may be, at best, demoralising people with good information into silence. At worst, it may be making them comfortably complicit with the bullshitters and liars:

"Today’s proclamations about the end of facts could reflect some wishful thinking, too. They let us off the hook for failing to arrive at common ground and say it’s not our fault when people think there really is a war on Christmas or a plague of voter fraud. In this twisted pipe-dream vision of democracy, we needn’t bother with the hard and heavy work of changing people’s minds, since disagreement is a product of our very nature or an unpleasant but irresolvable feature of our age."

I don't know whether Engber's right, but it does seem plausible that facts might be more robust and powerful than proponents of the boomerang effect suggest. After all, if people were as fact-proof as the theory suggests, why did Big Tobacco and Big Sugar spend so much of their time and money trying to suppress facts, or undermine them with fear, uncertainty and doubt?